WONG WINSOME DUMALAGAN

Vi de O 

2016, 2017

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Having volunteered in the same school in Cambodia a few times during 2014-2018,I lent out toy cameras for the children to capture their own life instead of me capturing their life from my own perspective. All the videos, playful colors and animation effects came from the children and the effects from the toy camera. Those were the times when smartphones were still not commonly used in Cambodia. I visited these sceneries I could seldom reach at the school where I taught them, through reviewing and composing these images from my students.

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It’s always difficult to put aside our presumptions when trying to understand someone else’s life. Even though I would visit the children’s home or hang around the neighborhood with them, my scope of understanding them is still very limited. Despite our different culture and language, it’s inevitable that I’m from a privileged place. I often feel I’m inadequate in sharing about them with my position. The children did not have the copy of the video footages and it could be a bit weird that the maybe-forgotten memories may have lasted even longer with me as the video footages stay with me and I edited them, and I got to look more closely to another side of their life that I usually would not witness. I thank them a lot for sharing these sides of their lives and their perspectives with me, as if they’re allowing me to see and travel through their eyes, leaving my own body for a while. Here there’s no such need to make a statement about their lives, it’s just their daily life and normal days they would like to capture.   

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Vi de O ver.3  was made in 2017 as an extension of Vi de O ver.2